Safety concerns found at Las Vegas airport after fatal collision in D.C.

WASHINGTON — A federal review of helicopter safety concerns launched after the deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C., has identified a rash of concerns about the potential conflicts between air tour helicopters and planes at the Las Vegas airport.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that it imposed new restrictions on helicopter flights around Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas that have already cut the number of collision alerts planes were receiving by 30 percent over the past three weeks.

Representatives of the airport had no comment about the new restrictions and referred a reporter back to the FAA. Executives with local air tour helicopter companies also had no comment.

The FAA said in the wake of the collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter in January that it planned to use artificial intelligence to dig into the millions of reports it collects to assess other places with busy helicopter traffic, including Boston, New York, Baltimore-Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and along the Gulf Coast.

The FAA’s acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, said Las Vegas quickly became a concern once the agency dug into the data because agreements with helicopter operators there didn’t clearly define vertical and lateral separation requirements when helicopters were approaching the airport. And air traffic controllers in the tower weren’t issuing traffic advisories between returning helicopters and airplanes.

“We took quick action, including exercising positive control over the helicopters and issuing more traffic advisories to pilots,” Rocheleau said. “As a result, the number of traffic alert and collision avoidance system reports decreased by 30 percent in just three weeks.”

A person familiar with Las Vegas helicopter air tours said there have been no major changes in tour operations and the reason there were so many collision avoidance system reports is because they are activated whenever a helicopter is within 1 mile of another flight.

In March, Reid’s westside terminal for helicopters and charter flights served 81,034 passengers, a 5.7 percent increase over March 2024. For the first quarter of 2025, passenger traffic at the westside terminal is up 0.5 percent to 218,128 passengers.

The Las Vegas airspace is one of the busiest air tour areas in the country, and tour pilots are well versed in Reid traffic patterns before they are allowed to fly. The tour companies operating at the west terminal of Reid have their own dispatch network communicating with each other.

Richard N. Velotta of the Review-Journal contributed to this story.